Oracle Blog

Globalisation Team

Translation in Indic languages

India is a multi-lingual nation with 17 recognized official languages. These languages are: Hindi,Assamese, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, Telugu, Odiya, Urdu, Bengali, Sanskrit, Kashmiri, Sindhi,Punjabi, Konkani, Marathi, Manipuri, Kannada and Nepali. Many literatures and scriptures are written in the local languages. All these are rich treasures which will be useful if it's converted to English or some common language. As more than 90% of India's population use their local language as their medium of communicational, the need of intra translation among indic languages is very much essential.
Sanskrit is considered to be the oldest language in human history. Sanskrit is the progenitor and inspiration for virtually every language spoken in India. It is based on very rich grammatical base and dictionary words. Many literatures and scientific works done were preserved in this form.
Most of the Indic languages follow most of the grammatical syntaxes of Sanskrit. Many words are also derived from Sanskrit. So for inter conversion of Indic languages, Sanskrit can take place as an intermediate language. Hence Sanskrit to indic language conversion and vice versa has a present day requirement.

Example:
English:
Samskrit: बालकः ग्रामं गछति (The boy is going to village )
Hindi: बालक् गाँव जाता है ।
Odiya:ବାଳକ ଗାଁକୁ ଯାଏ ।
Works done on Indic language
http://sanskrit.uohyd.ernet.in (For Sanskrit related work)
http://sanskrit.inria.fr/~anusaaraka (Mirror site, slightly older one)
http://ltrc.iiit.net/~anusaaraka (For English-Hindi anusaaraka)
Some work has been done by CDAC and IISC as well. You may be interested to visit following site to have some more info on this.
http://www.cfilt.iitb.ac.in/machine-translation/eng-hindi-mt/
http://www.cfilt.iitb.ac.in/wordnet/webhwn/index.php
http://bharani.dli.ernet.in/ebmt/